There will be Japanese game franchises will never been localized in North America, just as there are many NA franchises that will never be localized in Japan. I'm sure in Japan there are those who like NA games, but again they represent the smallest market. Same with Japanese games over here.

I hope.

If all the people who claim to be Mother fans had actually bought Earthbound, I don't doubt for a second the Mother Collection or Mother 3 would have come over but they didn't. There really aren't many Japanese only Wii titles made by Nintendo and most wouldn't work outside of their homeland.

I think people underestimate the cost of advertising. The biggest games see as much spent on advertising as they do game development and so whilst the actually translation might not be terribly expensive, there are still plenty of costs. And just because something has been released in one country, it doesn't mean the that translation will work in another country that uses the same language as we all have our own phrases/ sayings/ idioms, that would be lost on someone else. You still need to have someone read through the thing to make sure it all makes sense.

People on message boards who wish for game company X to do Y forget that they really do represesnt the smallest portion of the gaming market - they are the hardest of the "hardcore" but their numbers are far from representative of the overall market and even if everyone of them committed to something, it's still small potatoes in real terms.

I wish Nintendo would re-release the Mother games overseas in some form. I wouldn’t care if they would be on Virtual Console, a game disc, Wii Ware, or DSi ware, just as long as they are playable in some form.

Glad to see that there is another Mother fan. It'd be great if Nintendo would consider fans doing the work for them like they did for Mother 3 for Virtual Console releases.

English localization shouldn't be hard. In this day and age there are people who are fluent in both languages AND cultures so literally they can be the sole translator. The problem I see it as is the fact that Nintendo doesn't want to do it because there won't be enough profit to gain from it. Basically they rather spend their time on a more profitable game. So you may be thinking, "Why don't they just hire some new people to do this work and that won't effect other projects since you aren't using their resources. They can more than pay these people from the profits they make from the games being sold. AND this will increase their game library with better titles."

Well if you don't make much of a profit with these games then what's the reason to doing it? One would be to entice people to buy the console to play the games. But let me ask you this, how many people don't own a Wii who would buy one if more Japanese games were ported? Again, very small numbers so they won't see a jump in sales of their console really. Next would be to please their customers. And here you'll easily get out voted to have these ports as compared to customers who want another Kirby, Zelda, Mario, Smash Brothers, or etc. So basically the ONLY way Nintendo would do bring these Japanese games to other countries is if they think they can make a "significant" profit. As Michael Pachter says on his show, "It's a profit deal."

I do agree with Nintendo in the fact that there is much more to consider with localizing certain games. However, Nintendo needs to stop with so many casual games in the American market. If Nintendo released some of their more hardcore games as early releases instead of many of these third party titles, they would probably make a lot more money. I mean think about it, Wii Sports was cool for like a year or two, but it got boring. If they released Mother 3 with more updated graphics as an early release title for the Wii, more Nintendo fans (including myself) would have been pleased. I do realize that would have taken a lot more time and when the Wii launched it was centered around motion controls. But motion controls aren't everything, and I believe more effort should be placed in pleasing their hardcore fans. I'm not saying to completely disregard their casual games, but Nintendo should not have them as a center for a console. I will reiterate this, if more hardcore games were released, like Metroid and Fire Emblem, with motion controls or just no motion controls at all, Nintendo would have pleased their fanbase and made more money.

While I'm on the side that wants to see more from Nintendo besides Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon every year, I already know why they hardly leave their comfort zone. Unfortunately, Nintendo is doing what it needs to do to survive in the American market. A lot of g1s have already pointed out that there are just some genres of games that don't appeal to enough American gamers (who sadly only want to shoot things and play the same sports simulation games every year). While cult followings can be powerful and passionate, they unfortunately don't have enough manpower to become profitable. In a sense, it's not Nintendo's fault, it's our's. It's sad, but also painfully true.

Nintendo has to make the best business decision, and sometimes people aren't going to like the decision. Nintendo made New Super Mario Bros. 2 because they know Mario sells. They know that the Mario, Zelda, and Super Smash Bros. series sell more than the Star Fox, F-Zero, and Kirby series. Nintendo also knows that the American market would prefer to buy the new Madden or Call of Duty game than Mother 3. Ask yourself, if Nintendo brought the Earthbound games here, would people buy the games?

You know, it's not that easy to localise for Europe. You can't just translate them into english and good. The spanish/german/italian/french people (to count just the main languages) will be pissed. Also if you want to take them with the UK english and bring them to America, they will be pissed to because they want US-english. It's much more work to localize a game than it seemes and it can be very ungrateful